Customer Reviews

Spin Cycle

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4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Howard Kurtz, a sage media critic for the Washington Post, has crafted the modern masterpiece on how the spin game is played in Washington. As we all know, political success comes from developing a carefully constructed image, fed to the American public via the mass media. The staff in the President's press office work dilligently to dominate the news cycle and to present the calculated images and soundbytes that will help increase the President's public opinion numbers.

Kurtz could not have found a better case study, as Clinton's press staff (led by the brilliant Mike McCurry) help the boss survive one scandal and damaging revelation after another, from Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky and Impeachment. Ever wonder how Clinton survived those eight years intact? Read this book and it will all make sense. This book will soon be a must-read in both history and political science, where it will help future generations understand the Presidency, c. 2000.

The presidential flacks had done their job. For 1997, at least, their spin had carried the day.
-Howard Kurtz, Spin Cycle

In a story that is utterly devoid of edifying moments and chock full of quite depressing ones, these
final lines of the book are the most shocking. For it is only as you read them that the full realization
hits home that Howard Kurtz's justifiably jaded and cynical look at the way the Clinton administration
manipulated the press and the public in order to cover up or blunt scandal was written before the
Lewinsky scandal broke. Commingled with the shock though is the sudden comprehension that the
Clinton Administration was uniquely well prepared to deal with such a scandal, having spent the prior
seven years honing their obfuscatory skills on a whole series of equally disturbing and potentially
damaging scandals.

In fact, as Kurtz notes in a hastily tacked on Epilogue, one that subsequent events were to wholly
outpace, in the deposition that Bill Clinton gave in the Jones case, on the weekend that Matt Drudge
broke the Monica story, he revealed that he had in fact had sex with Gennifer Flowers. In other
words, on the very first occasion that most Americans saw Clinton, the infamous Super Bowl night 60
Minutes appearance, he lied to us all, with Hillary at his side, and it worked.

What Howard Kurtz really ends up detailing for us is just the long dress rehearsal before the big show,
in which the Clintons and their spin machine worked out all the kinks in their act. By the time the
Lewinsky scandal broke, they understood that all they had to do was deny initially, demonize liberally
(both accusers and investigators), leak pre-emptively, and acknowledge belatedly and they would be
able to so desensitize the press and the people that Bill Clinton would ultimately survive. And so, as
the tawdry mess reached its foreordained conclusion, we had the hitherto unimaginable situation of a
credible rape charge (by Juanita Broaddrick) against the President of the United States, which he did
not even deny, but which the press chose not to hound him with. He had finally just beaten them
down to the point where they didn't have the heart to pursue another scandal.

Then, in a moment which nearly redeems him, Clinton left office in a blizzard of bartered pardons and
other final acts of contempt for the staffers, supporters, and voters who had excused everything he'd
ever done. It was the final (...) gesture of a man who clearly understood that he had so implicated a
nation in his treachery that he had become untouchable. To judge Bill Clinton at that late date would
have required people to face all of the excuses and allowances that they'd made for him in the
preceding eight years, and that was not going to happen. It was all just so brazen that it was hard not
to admire the in-your-face flourish with which he departed. Howard Kurtz does a fine job of charting
the early years of the Clinton scandals, but there was so much more yet to come.

GRADE : B+

Howard Kurtz, aside from being a perceptive media critic, is a very luck man. <i>Spin Cycle<i> went to press just as the Lewinsky scandal broke. Now updated and in paperback, it is a must-read for anyone watching current coverage of the Clinton presidency and wondering how the heck we got here. Kurtz shows that the tensions between the Clintons and the White House press corps go back to the beginning of his presidency. For all his political savvy, Bill Clinton has never mastered media relations, and now, in crisis, he has no good will to call upon. Also central to Kurtz's story is outgoing press secretary Mike McCurry, a man who should receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his work in the trenches.

Notwithstanding the hype, this book is NOT an indictment of the Clinton White House or the Clintons. When carefully read, Kurtz has put together a stunningly subtle defense of the Clinton White House. The overall impression is NOT of a White House that BELIEVES there is wrong-doing going on and is covering it up, but a White House filled with innocents wrongly accused, and guilty only of occasional speed-errors-and-stumbling when confronted by a largely viscious and petty press. There are a number of prior-to-this untold stories. But half a dozen or so relatively harmless inside scoops are hardly worth the price of admission. What this book does effectively is a] detail the extent to which this White House over all others is willing to go to control the news, b] tend to excuse the snarly press coverage, and c] lead one to the conclusion that, barring circumstantial evidence, the guilt factor is just NOT present. As one reads it one is struck -- at least I was -- by the thought they did nothing I wouldn't have done in similar circumstances. If you're buying this book to check out the depth of guilt and wrong-doing in the White House, forget it, the "pickins'" are definitely slim. If you're buying it to get insight into the mechanisms and dynamics of spin perfected (vs. the content or accuracy of THAT spin), this book is for you; no value judgments -- lots of he said, she said.

The media and the White House are the players. The country and its people are the pawns. "Spin Cycle" is a revealing and highly disturbing report on the game people responsible for truthful and unbiased guidance of this country play. Howard Kurtz digs deep into the Clintonian bureaucracy to show how presidential aides, especially Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, juggle the news while the media vultures scavenge for sound bites. Kurtz shows how "the Press Party" sometimes takes the extra step when it comes to acting the role of gatekeepers. They are the ones who decide what will be the next morning's front headline. And if they do not have one that can sell enough copies, they create one. Kurtz points out the traditional measures by which the president should be evaluated, instead of scandals and issues not related to the presidency. "Now the increasingly opinionated mass media had somehow become the arbiter of the political success and the distiller of the conventional wisdom. A president's words were endlessly sliced and diced by the self-appointed pundits, his every move filtered through someone else's ideological lens," he writes. This manipulation and intimidation, however, works both ways. The Clintonites are deciding what their policy on an issue is depending on the mood of the press. The author concludes with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The journalists decided to draw the line. After numerous obscure press conferences, interviews and tip-offs, they demanded a blockbuster headline. And they got several. How and why was not important. At the end of all the "lovers quarrels," the public was exhausted. It seems that the only outcome of this "game of smoke and mirrors" was an increased distrust in the leadership of the country. "Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News" should be a mandatory reading for everyone concerned with constitutional rights and moral guidance of this country.

When reading this book, which focuses on the Clinton Presidency, you must put your biases aside. If you can't get beyond your personal feelings about Bill Clinton, you will fail to grasp the very thing that made his presidency as successful as it was.
Reviewers that claim Clinton demeaned the Presidency through his constant campaigning, are naive. The truth is Clinton showed how the modern President must function, in order to be successful in this era of gotcha-jounalism in Washington.
The Clinton press and communications office show political proffesionals the way to manage scandal. Strategies include the document dump, the timing of news releases, and possibly the most important strategy, communicating to the electorate through the media.
If journalists want to learn to anticipate the various ways politicians in the future will attempt to avoid being caught in a scandal, then they must study Kurtz' Spin Cycle if they ever hope to realize their dream of being the next Bob Wooward.

My main concern with this book is how it uses allegations and stories which emerged in the press and later proved untrue. Particularly with regards to the Lewinsky case, a lot of the remarks and speculations which Kurtz uses to draw a picture of how the story unfolded, have proved to be exactly that: speculations. I find it unsettling that someone apparantly so serious as Kurtz has not done some proper sourcechecking. Furthermore, I found the structure of the book to be very chaotic. Also, when I read a book about the development of spin, I don't want a book that reads "like a thriller", if I did, I would buy a thriller. For people with interest in the subject of the relationship between the press and the presidency, I strongly recommend Warp Speed by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach. It will give a nice counterweight to Spin Cycle, and furthermore put some of Kurtz's ideas into perspective.

Poorly written. Not much new. Of interest to people who (1) like reading detailed accounts of how the press works but aren't concerned about structure or content, (2) like reading anything bad about Clinton, (3) find it scandalous that that politicians try to use the press to make themselves look good, (4) find it amazing that large donors to political parties are allowed to talk to politicians, or (5) feel there is no such thing as a bad sentence if it has at least one negative adjective in it.

Being a fan of President Clinton I always read a book on his administration with a bit of a bias view. At times this book upset me and other times I was shouting "right on", given these duel responses I have come to the conclusion that, no matter that I did not agree with a number of items, the book is an overall fair look at the Clinton scandal fest. I thought the author did a great job in weaving together the pertinent facts about each of the scandals / issues with the response from the White House. I was very interested in the inside info on how the White House tried to either spin or deflect each of the stories. The author had a great deal of direct quotes of conversations, which really made the book come alive. The information about the White House briefing is worth the price of the book alone. You can actually see this type of activity at work today with the current briefings that are televised.

I also was interested in the additional comments on the way that the Clinton's themselves viewed the media and their knee jerk reaction to clam up at every question. You almost got the feeling that if the Clinton's would have always listened to the media people on their staffs that some of the overall negative and nasty press they received may have been decreased to some degree. The last bit of the book that surprised me was the, at times, rude, disrespectful and almost violent way the media and the White House staff dealt with each other. You just got to wonder what the White House staff was thinking to beat up on the people with the loudest voice in the country. My only complaint was that the book ended too soon, missing the Super Bowl of the spin, the Starr Report and the impeachment. It would have been nice for the author to have held out a year or so for the full story in the paperback. Overall I found this book well written, very interesting and quite enjoyable. It is required reading for anyone that is interested in the Clinton years or the media.

I'll admit that I picked up this book expecting a more in-depth analysis of the various trevails of the Clinton administration as well as Bill and Hillary themselves. If you're considering the book for this purpose, you will probably be best served elsewhere. However, if your interested in the daily give and take between the White House administration and the press you'll find it entertaining. If ever there was an argument for reducing the federal beauracracy, this is it starting at the very top. Kurtz succeeds (whether he intended to or not) in proving that there are so many people involved in any particular issue that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. He also succeeds in showing that the true power of the White House lies in the Press Secretaries office. And those responsible for telling the public what's going on...the press...is caught in the middle.

What Kurtz fails to do is write in a style that reads easily. He seemingly jumps from o! ne anecdote to another with little to connect the two. I found myself wondering why he's telling a particular story and what it had to do with the story before. In short, he writes this book as a column with limited space.